I lay awake a long time that night thinking about Sharon and Fitzpiers and Fitzpiers’s passion for inter-galactic lactic nursing mothers, and all the while I nursed a little something of my own – the idea that Sharon was jealous. What else had she meant when she said she cared? She cared about Fitzpiers. She was jealous of Suzi. It was also possible, I realised, that she was jealous of that glorious aura of peace which went with motherhood, and that Fitzpiers wasn’t the only small new thing she wanted at her breast. I knew that she had always had leanings in that direction and that she was, of late, beginning to panic slightly about her age. But I made a point of putting off all serious discussion of the subject; I wasn’t ready even if she was; there was nothing about myself that I had so far discovered that I was expressly anxious to perpetuate. And naturally, what had happened to me in Harry Vilbert’s chair disposed me even less to the principle of proliferation. There was too much chaos and carelessness abroad already; someone had to say, ‘Hold! Enough!’ and then and there husband his seed. So if it was Tamsin that Sharon envied Suzi for, there was nothing in all conscience that I could do for her; but if it was merely Dr Rowland Fitzpiers, well there was something that I could. I could stand aside. I could make way. I could make a present of each to the other. I was guided here, you will perceive, by motives that did not lack altruism. But they did not lack self interest either. I wasn’t planning to stand too far away. I intended to watch them both unwrap their parcels. And having arrived at that decision – if it wasn’t a decision, what was it? – I throbbed myself to sleep.

I awoke the next day late, still woozy with rough thoughts. I felt light in the stomach, as if I hadn’t eaten for weeks, and dizzy, as if I had just come off the big dipper. By the time Fitzpiers rang to apologize for Suzi’s behaviour, to explain that she had now gone back to her husband, and to suggest that he come round that evening to apologize to Sharon in person, I was so unsteady on my feet that I could have been blown over by one belch from Suzi’s baby

I did nothing all day. If I’d left the house I would certainly have got lost. When Sharon came home from the shop, full of news and gossip – guess how many Desperate Remedies she’d sold today? who did I think had been in looking for The Hand of Ethelberta this afternoon? – I merely stared at her across the kitchen table with dead eyes.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked. I could see that she had recovered from last night’s despondency and was looking sparky.